Creative Commons has had a HUGE impact on the work I do, helping teachers accomplish their learning objectives with students

I believe:
– differentiating instruction is essential to improving education
– textbooks are not good tools for differentiation (traditional textbooks)
– technology coupled with high quality content is great for differentiation
– teachers and students need high quality resources they can use to LEGALLY build interactive lessons, podcasts, multimedia presentations, etc.
– sharing is good

website freereading.net example
– lots of decodable passage examples, but they are all PDFs
– we thought it would be great for these reading passages to be in more interactive mediums
– We took these PDFs and put them into Voicethread

Because those materials were openly licensed, we could do this legally
– many materials states purchase as curriculum do NOT give permission for teachers and others to repurpose their content on a public website

OER is relevant to education:
– because it creates content suitable for ‘remixing’ for differentiation
– it increases equity
– it’s FREE
– it models 21st century skills (copyright)
– represents a wise use of public funds

I see so many examples in schools of everyone right clicking Google images and putting them everywhere / publishing them everywhere
– we need more conversations about copyright

Kids are very interested in copyright sessions because they view themselves as content producer

When you purchase something or make something that is openly licensed, then everyone can benefit from it

99% of everything on the Internet IS copyrighted
– there is a continuum of copyright

fair use is quite a bit narrower than most teachers think it is
– it applies in your classroom

ACTUALLY, THE TEACH ACT IS SPECIFIC TO INSTRUCTIONAL SETTINGS BUT FAIR USE IS NOT SPECIFIC TO EDUCATION, THERE IS A PROVISION FOR NON-COMMERCIAL USE

Citing sources is a LEGAL requirement for Creative Commons works
– always cite sources
– credit the person who owns the copyright, not necessarily the website
– sometimes I see “credit: Creative Commons” or “credit: Google” but that doesn’t cut it
– screen names are ok for attribution credit
– it’s optional but a good idea to include the source URL where an image came from (that is very useful to go back and investigate things)

THIS SESSION MAKES ME THINK WE REALLY SHOULD DEVELOP SOME TOOLS TO ASSIST IN MEDIA ATTRIBUTION FOR STORYCHASERS PROJECTS (AND OPENLY LICENSE THEM, OF COURSE!)

Hands on part:
– think of a unit of student or standard as you research, evaluate, and collect OERs to use in that unit
– think about building a “media set”

With OER you can put the resources legally on your OWN site

Great idea I’m really enthused about: creating media sets of resource materials aligned to curriculum
– Example: The Human Body media set
– on our site, when you right click images and get properties we embed license terms with

If everyone creates openly licensed materials like these tied to curriculum and standards, we’ll be overflowing with them

Flickr is the BEST resource I’ve seen for openly licensed images
– advanced search in Flickr is best way to get to Flickr CC images
– check boxes to ONLY search CC and find content to remix:

Wikimedia Commons is another great resource
– many people have gone into the Library of Congress and better organized their content, pulled high quality elements, etc and put it in the Wikimedia Commons

Math is richest area for OER right now
– lots of people know about Kahn Academy, but views are all over about it
– I think differentiation is about having a big menu of choices
– for some kids Kahn’s content will work great, but not for everyone (over 2100 videos available)
– he is starting to do
– Kahn academy also hosted
– also have “Kahn on a stick” so you can download lots of the videos easily

Mathispower4u tutorials from James Sousa, originally designed as a Community College resource
– a lot of this kind of community college stuff is high school remediation
– there are thousands of math tutorial videos

Karl Fisch’s algebra videos are excellent, structured in a pedagogically appealing way (different from Kahn’s more informal style)

Share as much as you can and feel comfortable with
– set your Flickr default license to CC BY
– use open platforms like WikiSpaces which have a default open license, and/or put a default open license on your stuff